New ethical review agency in place from 2019

Research projects are subject to ethical review to protect people who are involved in the research. The Swedish Government now wants to create uniformity in ethical review throughout the country and has proposed a new government agency for this purpose, which will be in place on 1 January 2019, writes Dagens Nyheter.

The Ethical Review Board in Stockholm is one of six regional ethical review boards in Sweden, and is based at the Karolinska Institutet’s Solna Campus.

In a bill to the Parliament, the Swedish Government now wants to replace these regional boards with a single new national authority. This national authority will still have six regional boards with equivalent routines who will make decisions on individual cases. But from 2019, the cases will be distributed from the central authority, which means that it no longer needs to be the closest ethical review board geographically that reviews the case.

Minister for Higher Education and Research Helene Hellmark Knutsson has said to Dagens Nyheter that the advantage of the new organisation is that equivalent evaluations of ethical review applications can now be done throughout the country, and that disqualification situations can be avoided by assigning evaluations to an ethical review board without any personal connections between the researcher and persons on the board.